"Epic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... derivation of the name from "Nasika," a nose, in allusion to the fate which here overtook the demon Shurpanakhi. It is altogether too savage an appellation for a city whose purity was established in the "Krita Yuga," and whose fame is coeval with that of the great protagonists of Hindu myth and epic. The great city of religion in the West stood upon seven hills, the holy city of the East stood upon nine; and the famous rivers which flow past them whisper in each case of a heritage of undying renown. Fancy hand in hand perhaps with a substratum of historical truth ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... a picturesque village, near Thame, in Oxfordshire, is entitled to notice in the annals of literature, as the family seat of the MILTONS, ancestors of Britain's illustrious epic poet. Of this original abode, our engraving is an accurate representation. One of Milton's ancestors forfeited his estate in the turbulent times of York and Lancaster. "Which side he took," says Johnson, "I know not; his descendant ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... the greater part of Bjoernson's poetry not dramatic in form were both published in 1870. One of them was the collection of his "Poems and Songs," the other was the epic cycle, "Arnljot Gelline," the only long poem that he has written. The volume of lyrics includes many pieces of imperfect quality and slight value,—personal tributes and occasional productions,—but ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... epic—a colossal monument to this man, thought Sergeant Fitzgerald, as they pried ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... dreams inspire the bard Who rolls the epic song; Friendship and truth be my reward— To me no bays belong; If laurell'd Fame but dwells with lies, Me the enchantress ever flies, Whose heart and not whose fancy sings; Simple and young, I dare not feign; Mine be the rude yet heartfelt strain, "Friendship is ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... "Venus" and the "Lucrece," said finely of Shakespeare "Shakespeare could not have written an Epic; he would have died of plethora of thought." This prodigality of nature is exemplified equally in his Sonnets. The copious selection here given (which from the wealth of the material, required greater consideration than ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... of modern times is but a small fraction of the long epic of human history. If, as seems highly probable, the conservative estimates of recent scientists that mankind has inhabited the earth more than fifty thousand years [Footnote: Professor James Geikie, of the University of Edinburgh, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... nevertheless intended a sly touch of irony upon his proverbially prosing character. He therefore determined to "be up to him," as the fancy have it; and having somewhere found the copy of an obsolete satirical epic which an enamored snuff-taker had once addressed to a mistress, who could reciprocate the interjection over her ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... passionate hour, during which passion quickened the intellect; and the head, while resisting all illusions of the heart, was roused to that resistance by the heart itself. Such an hour is full of events; it may be almost epic in its plenitude of action; but the events are ideas. The frame and setting of the discussion also are more than frame and setting; they co-operate with the thoughts; they form part of the experience. The poet is alone among the mountains, with dawn ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... the general staff riding by, who kept his vision fixed on the aim, that is, the victory that sooner or later would be celebrated to the clinking of glasses—why, from that point of view Weixler was right! It must make him indignant to have events of such epic grandeur made ridiculous by such a chicken-hearted creature as Simmel and degraded into a doleful ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... riddle to him. Of all the great Russian writers not one has contributed more to the interpretation of the enigmatical soul of the moujik than Russia's great poet, Nekrassov, in his life-work the national epic, Who can be ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... became a sort of comedy-epic in the land of the Czars, the land where each petty town-governor is almost an absolute despot, regulating his persecutions and extortions according to the sage saying of the town-governor in the play, "That's the way God made the world, ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... epic was called by him a comedy because its ending was not tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it the epithet "divine." It is in three parts—Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso (paradise). It has been made accessible to English readers in the metrical translations ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... made by Orr was epic. At all other good stews it was recalled and discussed, but never did a stew come up to the stew that we so scrupulously divided among us on the bright morning of Sept. 12, 1914, ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... declare him to be the only mathematician capable of squaring the circle; the only mechanic acquainted with the principle of perpetual motion; the only scientific philosopher who can compel water to run up hill; the only writer of the age whose genius is equal to the production of an epic poem; and, finally, so various are his accomplishments, the only professor of gymnastics who has succeeded in jumping down his own throat. With all these talents, however, he is so far from being considered ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... noble Book; all men's Book! It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending Problem,—man's destiny, and God's ways with him here in this earth. And all in such free flowing outlines; grand in its sincerity, in its simplicity; in its epic melody, and repose of reconcilement. There is the seeing eye, the mildly understanding heart. So true everyway; true eyesight and vision for all things; material things no less than spiritual: the Horse—"hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?"—he "laughs ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... plays of William Shakespeare"? says the reader—"O no! The plays of William Shakespeare Cockerill," and he throws the book aside. In wise pursuance of such views, Mr. John Milton Hengler, who not long since delighted us in this favoured town, has never attempted to write an epic, but has chosen a new path, and has excelled upon the tight-rope. A marked example of triumph over this is the case of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. On the face of the matter, I should have advised him to imitate the pleasing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of hurry like ours the appearance of an epic poem more than five thousand lines in length cannot but be regarded as remarkable. Whether such a form of art is the one most suited to our century is a question. Edgar Allan Poe insisted that no poem should take more than an hour ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... of folly will lurk and sprout to confound us Our comedies are frequently youth's tragedies Partake of a morning draught Patronizing woman Play second fiddle without looking foolish Pride is the God of Pagans Propitiate common sense on behalf of what seems tolerably absurd Rare as epic song is the man who is thorough in what he does Read one another perfectly in their mutual hypocrisies Rebukes which give immeasurable rebounds Recalling her to the subject-matter with all the patience ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... same kind as that of the Blacksmiths, which should sum up the most poetical methods of human activity, and which should be called (unless you advise otherwise) Labourers, Sailors, and Soldiers, would form a lyric epic of which the genius of Rossini or Meyerbeer would be proud. I know I have no right to make any such claim, but your kindness to me has always been so great that I have a faint hope of obtaining this new and glorious favor. If, however, this work would give you even an hour's trouble, please ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... the Arrakan Pagoda to-day, but a pleasant looking man came on board with a chitsaya harp; I had to try and make a jotting of him. G. and Captain Turndrup brought him. He sat and played tunes for hours—epic tunes, which I'd have given anything to remember. His boat-shaped harp of thirteen strings was tuned in minor thirds, so you could readily pick out Celtic tunes on it. I am told Sir Arthur Sullivan came here and listened to his music and made many notes. The harp belonged to Prince Dabai, Thebaw's ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... intense, glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... historical fact, if fact it be," said Arthur. "I always thought he wrote it in English, and that the poem was of the epic order." ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... saw the Cone of Battle hurling itself toward Roger's planetoid. They saw the pirate fleet rush out to do battle with Triplanetary's massed forces, and with bated breath they watched every maneuver of that epic battle to its savagely sacrificial end. And that same battle was being watched, also with ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... downright wrestle with necessity. There was no chance for poetry among the Puritans. And yet if any people have a right to imagination, it should be the descendants of these very Puritans. They had enough of it, or they could never have conceived the great epic they did, whose books are States, and which is written on this continent ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... lost wars, finds triumphant expression in Marlowe and his elder contemporaries. Marlowe's[8] great dialect seems to fall naturally from the lips of the heroes of Hakluyt's Voyages, that work which still impresses the imagination like the fragments of some rude but mighty epic, and in their company the exaggeration, the emphasis of Tamburlaine are hardly perceptible. In Martin Frobisher, for instance, how the purpose which determines his career illumines for us the England of the ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... The Roman Epic abounds in moral and poetical defects; nevertheless it remains the most complete picture of the national mind at its highest elevation, the most precious document of national history, if the history of an age is revealed in its ideas, no less than in its ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... write the history of the great Rising. That has been done by abler men, who were at the centre of the business, and had some knowledge of strategy and tactics; whereas I was only a raw lad who was privileged by fate to see the start. If I could, I would fain make an epic of it, and show how the Plains found at all points the Plateau guarded, how wits overcame numbers, and at every pass which the natives tried the great guns spoke and the tide rolled back. Yet I fear it would be an epic without a hero. There was no leader left ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... read parts of Homer, parts of Thucydides, parts of Tacitus, parts of the tragedians, at school, but now he had it in his power to study a great author entire, and as a whole. Never before did he fully appreciate the "thunderous lilt" of Greek epic, the touching and voluptuous tenderness of Latin elegy, the regal pomp of history, the gorgeous and philosophic mystery of the old dramatic fables. Never before had he learnt to gaze on "the bright countenance of truth, in ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... the history of Ireland as the epic, not of a futile and defeated, but of an indomitable ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... Ravana is told in the Ramayana, which with the Mahabarata form the two great epic poems of the Hindoos; the latter was written by Vyasa, and ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... ghostly figure, paced along the edge of sand that ran round the islet, the purple but cloudy poetry which was his native element was piled up at its thickest upon his soul. The unique island and the endless sea emphasized the thing solely as an epic. There were no ladies or policemen here to give him a hint either of its farce or ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... allowed to be a good military critic; but all this is possible without his possessing any positive qualities of a great general, just as a literary critic may show the profoundest acquaintance with the principles of epic poetry without being able to produce a single stanza of an epic poem. Nevertheless, I shall not give up my faith in General McClellan's soldiership until he is defeated, nor in his ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... leaders, and here was a pivotal point in his life. Had not Washington persuaded him to remain "just for the present" in America, he might have played a part in Carlyle's best book, that book which is not history, but more—an epic. So, among the many obligations that America owes to Washington, must be named this one of pushing Thomas Jefferson, the scholar and man of peace, into the political embroglio and shutting the door. Then it was that Hamilton's taunting temper awoke a ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... time. Even before peace came German generals paid ungrudging tributes to the efficiency of our Regular Army, writing down in their histories of war that this was the model of all armies, the most perfectly trained... It was spent by the spring of '15. Its memory remains as the last epic of those professional soldiers who, through centuries of English history, took "the King's shilling" and fought when they were told to fight, and left their bones in far places of the world and in many fields in Europe, and won for the British soldier universal fame as a terrible ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... me at present, and I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe Cobourg, might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... what we do. You may reconcile two families who have half-killed each other, as in Brittany and in La Vendee during the civil wars, but you can no more reconcile the calumniators and the calumniated than you can the spoilers and the despoiled. It is only in epic poems that men curse each other before they kill. The savage, and the peasant who is much like a savage, seldom speak unless to deceive an enemy. Ever since 1789 France has been trying to make man believe, against all evidence, that they are equal. To say ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... research, contrary to popular opinion, is one of the most thrilling of occupations, but I question whether any biographer has ever had a better time gathering his material than I have had. Amid the old scenes, the old epic life of the frontier has been re-created for me by the men who were the leading actors in it. But my contact with it has not been only vicarious. In the course of this most grateful of labors I have myself come to know something of the life that Roosevelt knew thirty-five ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... Yudisthira, Rama, and Arjuna in India, all bard-created heroes molding the minds of men to their image. It is the great defect of our modern literature that it creates few such types. How hardly could one of our modern public men be made the hero of an epic. It would be difficult to find one who could be the subject of a genuine lyric. Whitman, himself the most democratic poet of the modern world, felt this deficiency in the literature of the later democracies, and lamented the absence of great heroic figures. The poets have ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... peace, let us approach a great name among our English singers of liberty. Swinburne stands in the foremost rank. In a collection of "English Songs of Italian Freedom," edited by Mr. George Trevelyan, who himself has so finely narrated the epic of Italy's redemption—in that collection Swinburne occupies a place among the very highest. No one has paid nobler tribute to the heroes of that amazing revolution. No one has told the sorrow of their failures with more sympathetic rage, or has poured so burning ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... copied from Virgil, as Virgil had copied it from the Sicilian and Alexandrian Greeks, and to which had been given the name of Bucolic or Pastoral. Petrarch, in imitation of Virgil, had written Latin Bucolics, as he had written a Latin Epic, his Africa. He was followed in the next century by Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516), the "old Mantuan," of Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost, whose Latin "Eglogues" became a favourite school-book in England, ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... with folded arms (this one seldom thinks to the purpose); another sits cross-legged, brows lowered: another must put his head into his hand, and so keep it up to thinking mark: another must twiddle a bit of string, or a key; grant him this, he can hatch an epic. This commandant must draw himself up very straight, and walk six paces and back very slowly, till the problem was solved: I suspect he had done a good bit of sentinel work ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... brooding and solemn tenderness. The "Song" and "A.D. MDCXX." (a memoir of the notorious galleon of the Pilgrims) are in a lighter vein. The tonal plangency, the epic quality, of these studies is extraordinary,—exposing a tendency toward an orchestral fulness and breadth of style that will offer a more pertinent theme for comment in a consideration of the sonatas. Their littleness ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... opened to him, though in what measure, and by what gradations, must remain undecided. Before him lay both the tragedies and the comedies, as he would have called them, of the learned and brilliant Boccaccio—both his epic poems and that inexhaustible treasure-house of stories which Petrarch praised for its pious and grave contents, albeit they were mingled with others of undeniable jocoseness—the immortal "Decamerone." He could examine the refined gold of Petrarch's ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... and, with united forces, take for a time a single direction. So she taps it at its sources, and leads it away to various ends, useful because they are harmless. Bibliomania, tulipomania, potichomania, squaring the circle, perpetual motion, a religious epic, the northwest passage,—anything will serve the purpose. Divide et impera is her motto. The hobby is the safeguard of society. Once mounted, every enthusiast ambles quietly off on some errand of his own, caring ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... have attained very high eminence in various walks of his sublime art; his works are very numerous, and as diverse in their form as in their spirit; he is sometimes a romantic, sometimes a legendary, sometimes an epic, sometimes a satiric, and sometimes a dramatic poet;—in most, if not in all, of these various lines he has attained the highest eminence as yet recognised by his countrymen; and, consequently, whatever impression may be made upon our readers by the present essay at a transfusion of his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... Restauraw is one of the few superior hostelries of the Territory. Mrs. Rucker, its charming proprietress, is a cook who might outrival even that celebrated chef, now dead, M. Soyer. Her pies are poems, her bread an epic, and her beans a dream, Mrs. Rucker has cooked her way to every heart, and her famed establishment is justly regarded as the bright particular gem in ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... wore in his buttonhole a dainty blue flower whose name I do not know; and as he bowed distantly to Charles, whom he surveyed through his eyeglass, the gleam of a big diamond in the middle of his shirt-front betrayed the fact that the Briar-rose school, as it was called (from his famous epic), had at least succeeded in making money out of poetry. He explained to us a little later, in fact, that he was over in New York to look after his royalties. "The beggars," he said, "only gave me eight hundred pounds on my last volume. I couldn't stand that, you know; for a modern bard, moving ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... of sculpture and painting, by which their mythic beings are represented, and they also consist of dancing, by which religious fervor is produced, and they give rise to music, romance, poetry, and drama. Thus it is that the esthetic arts have their origin in mythology. The epic poem and the symphony are lineal descendants of the dance, and the dance arises as the first form of worship, born of the mythic conception of the ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... marrying, breeding, and above all living! "All of life is good!" Each one of these millions had its own drama, each to itself, as hers had been to her, with that tragic importance of being lived but once from the germ to the ultimate dust. Each one was its own epic, its own experience, and its own fulfilment. As Renault once said, "Any of the possibilities may lie in a human soul." And in that was the hope and the faith for Democracy,—the infinite ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... battle with white gaiters; The Conscripts here, with green and pear-shaped tufts. Who marched to battle with their gaiters black. Like a poor prisoner, who falls a-dreaming Of vast and murmuring forests, with a tree Fashioned of shavings, taken from a doll's house, I build my Father's Epic with these soldiers. ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... the great Sanskrit epic, King Santanu is said to have walked by the side of the river one day, where "he met and fell in love with a beautiful girl, who told him that she was the river Ganges, and could only marry him on condition he never questioned her conduct. ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... is the prose of this literature, especially the Sagas. The saga is a prose epic, characteristic of the Norse countries. It records the life of a hero, told according to fixed rules. As we have said, the sagas were based upon careers run in Iceland's stormy time. They are both mythical and historical. In the mythical group are, among others, ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... encouragement, as we shall see, Harrington was urged to complete his version of the Orlando Furioso, and she willingly accepted in the year 1600 the dedication of Fairfax's admirable translation of the great epic of Tasso. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... could write you a letter of comfort, I would sit down to it with as much pleasure, as I would to write an epic poem of my own composition that should equal the Iliad. Religion, my dear friend, is the true comfort! A strong persuasion in a future state of existence; a proposition so obviously probable, that, setting revelation aside, every nation ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... his humanity, Horace remains. Epic Virgil, appealing to the traditions of a living race of nobles and to the carefully hidden, sober vanity of the world's absolute monarch, does not appeal to modern man. The twilight of the gods has long deepened ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... attempted to scale with success. And when it is considered, that many languages, and many sciences, must contribute to the perfection of poetical composition, it will appear less strange. The lofty Epic, the pointed Satire, and the more daring and successful flights of the Tragic Muse, seem reserved for the bold ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... otherwise had better be relieved. It is the precept that the German Army itself taught and practiced at Ypres and Verdun. On July 1st a question was answered for anyone who had been in the Manchurian war. He learned that those bred in sight of cathedrals in the civilization of the epic poem can surpass without any inspiration of oriental fatalism or religious fanaticism the courage of the land of ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... then, for heroine' clamoured he, 'And make her some great Princess, six feet high, Grand, epic, homicidal; and be you The Prince to win her!' 'Then follow me, the Prince,' I answered, 'each be hero in his turn! Seven and yet one, like shadows in a dream.— Heroic seems our Princess as required— But something made to suit with Time and place, A ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... volcano goddess Pele and her compeers. Thus in the cantillations of the old-time hula we find a ready-made anthology that includes every species of composition in the whole range of Hawaiian poetry. This epic[1] of Pele was chiefly a more or less detached series of poems forming a story addressed not to the closet-reader, but to the eye and ear and heart of the assembled chiefs and people; and it was sung. The Hawaiian song, its note of joy par excellence, was the oli; ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... our valley inhaled with every breath this mingled air of romance and sorrow, history and song, and through those epic days runs a deep-laid consciousness of maternal pain. My mother's side of those long months of waiting was never fully delineated, for she was natively reticent and shy of expression. But piece by piece in later years I drew from her the tale of her long vigil, and obtained some hint of the bitter ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... name. It is a gathering-up of all that men could do. It has fifty roofs, it has a gigantic signal tower, it has blank walls like precipices, and round arch after round arch, and architrave after architrave. It is like a good and settled epic; or, better still, it is like the life of a healthy and adventurous man who, having accomplished all his journeys and taken the Fleece of Gold, comes home to tell his stories at evening, and to pass among his own people the years that are left to him of his age. It has experience and ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... of the disinterested Gael, who, like Lear, gives his kingdom away, and is content to become a pensioner upon his own issue for a beggarly pittance!—Open this far-famed Book!—I have done so at random, and the beginning of the 'Epic Poem Temora,' in eight Books, presents itself. 'The blue waves of Ullin roll in light. The green hills are covered with day. Trees shake their dusky heads in the breeze. Grey torrents pour their noisy streams. Two green hills with aged oaks surround a narrow plain. The blue course of a stream is ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... once upon a time your poet launched a great epic in his mind. Alas, I was not careful, and it struck your ringing anklets and came to grief. It broke up into scraps of songs and lay scattered at your feet. All my cargo of the stories of old wars was tossed by the laughing waves ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... than in beating Shorty. After all, he concluded, it wasn't the reward of the game but the playing of it that counted. Mind, and muscle, and stamina, and soul, were challenged in a contest with this Shorty, a man who had never opened the books, and who did not know grand opera from rag-time, nor an epic from a chilblain. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... I was allowed to do nothing save read, from morning to night. As my taste and appetite were gratified in nothing else, I indemnified myself by becoming a glutton of books. Accordingly, I believe, I read almost all the old romances, old plays, and epic poetry, in that formidable collection, and no doubt was unconsciously amassing materials for the task in which it has been my lot to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... is unsafe to say. The composition itself is a poem—a romance—an epic. This is against the historical value of its subject-matter. Then, it has taken its present form under the hands of a Christian. This is against its value as cotemporaneous evidence. Thirdly, it has the character, to no small extent, not only of a rhapsody, ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... "That does not seem to have been the opinion of the Beast Epic," said she, and the entrance of Babie prevented them from ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sea-power to which Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, and France all contributed maritime genius and boundless courage, becomes transformed under the half-accidental success of one nation into an almost religious epic of a destined wave-ruler. There could not be a finer British spirit than Mr. Chesterton's fallen friend, the poet Vernede, yet even ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... Serendib,) the khan gives some notices of the legends connected with its history, which show a more extended acquaintance with Hindu literature than the Moslems in India in general take the trouble of acquiring. Among the rest he alludes to the epic of the Ramayuna, and the bridge built by Rama (or as he calls him, Rajah Ram Chunder) for the passage of the monkey army and their redoubled general, Huniman, from the Indian continent into the island, in order to deliver from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... stand before that picture of Turner's in the National Gallery. The late Mr. Froude believed in a good time coming when the sea-captains of Elizabeth are to find their bard and sit enshrined in 'great English national epic as grand as the Odyssey' It may be, but as yet our poets have achieved but a few sea-fights, marine adventures, and occasional pieces, which wear a spirited but accidental look, and suggest the ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... on horseback, songs of war and its sufferings. These songs have nothing of the excessive formalism and aestheticism of the Chinese, but give expression to simple emotions in unpolished language with a direct appeal. The epic of the Turkish peoples had clearly been developed already, and in north China it produced a rudimentary ballad literature, to which four hundred years later no less attention was paid than to the emotional world of ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... be sure, boasted of her Dwight, her Trumbull, and her Barlow. The "Connecticut wits" are interesting personalities; but the society which could read, with anything akin to pleasure, Dwight's Conquest of Canaan—an epic in eleven books with nearly ten thousand lines—was more admirable for its physical endurance than for its poetical intuitions. Latrobe was quite right when he wrote that in America the labor of the hand took precedence ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... a single ballad, but a conglomeration of several, forming a short epic. Ballads representing its component parts are not now extant; although on the other hand there are later ballads founded on certain episodes in the Gest. The compiler availed himself of incidents from other traditional sources, ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... periods aloud before committing them to the white pages of his day-book; and more than once, unfaithful to Clio, the muse of history, he invoked in his transports the divine Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... Land acquired a taste for chatting, and I loved to hear the recital of his adventures in the polar seas. He related his fishing, and his combats, with natural poetry of expression; his recital took the form of an epic poem, and I seemed to be listening to a Canadian Homer singing the Iliad of the regions ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... the same principle that the humours of children are indulged to keep them out of mischief. As my taste and appetite were gratified in nothing else, I indemnified myself by becoming a glutton of books. Accordingly, I believe I read almost all the romances, old plays, and epic poetry in that formidable collection, and no doubt was unconsciously amassing materials for the task in which it has been my lot to be ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Revolt of Islam, so puzzling to the uninitiated reader by the wilful inversions of its mythology, and its history which seems to belong to no conceivable race of men, becomes, when one grasps its underlying ideas, a luminous epic of revolutionary faith, precious if only because it is told in that elaborately musical Spenserian stanza which no poet before or after Shelley has handled with such easy mastery. Their mission to free their countrymen comes ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... Sordavala Festival, an accurate representation of a native wedding of a hundred years ago was given, perhaps for the reason that the performers were thus naturally enabled to introduce many of the bridal songs contained in their great epic poem, Kalevala, and their collection of ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... later he was pointed out to strangers by the people of Sweetwater Springs. "That is Richard Clement, the sole owner of 'The Witch,' a mine valued at three millions of dollars." This in itself was truly an epic. ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... historians, unable to confirm the exaggerations of the Brahmans, and yet reluctant to detract from the epic renown of their country by disclaiming its stupendous dimensions, attempted to reconcile its actual extent with the fables of the eastern astronomers by imputing to the agency of earthquakes the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... of Highland minstrelsy admit of simple classification. The Duan Mor is the epic song; its subdivisions are termed duana or duanaga. Strings of verse and incidents ([Greek: Rhapsodia]) were intended to form an epic history, and were combined by successive bards for that purpose. The battle-song (Prosnuchadh-catha) was the next in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... going to watch. I'm going to watch one of the epic events of our time—" For a moment Beardsley was solemn, almost shocked, as a thought struck him. "In a way it will be sad. Yes, it will! ECAIAC is about ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... of the incident described in the last chapter was to strengthen the bond between John and Desmond. Desmond had the epic from Fluff, from the Caterpillar, and finally from ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... men striving for harmonious forms of beauty in green and growing things had tested, and which the Doge, in all his unconventionalism of personality, was as little inclined to amend as he was to amend the classic authors. An avenue of palms is the epic of the desert; a ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... proclaims To gaping crowds the glory of their names,— 'Tis then the mem'ries of warriors die, And fall—alas!—into obscurity, Until the poet, in whose verse alone Exists a world—can make their actions known, And in eternal epic measures, show They are not yet forgotten here below. And yet by us neglected! glory gloomed, Thy name seems sealed apart, entombed, Although our shouts to pigmies rise—no cries To mark thy presence echo to the skies; Farewell to Grecian ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... as to style; and being translated from a kindred tongue is delightful as mere language. In its rude joviality, and simple and direct delineation of character, it is a thoroughly good representative of the famous ancient Beast Epic.' The edges of this book, and of all subsequent books, were trimmed in accordance with the invariable practice of the early printers. Mr. Morris much ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... makes a machine and the man who flies one are the heroes of the epic of flight. Next to them, all credit must be given to the public-spirited financiers and patrons who encouraged flight, especially to those of them who were not deceived, and knew that they are the servants, not the masters, of the conquerors of the air. As ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... of Mr. Meeker in this enterprise was to induce people to mark the famous old highway. To him it represented a great battle ground in our nation's struggle to win and hold the West. The story of the Oregon Trail, he rightly felt, is an American epic which must be preserved. Through his energy and inspiration and the help of thousands of loyal men and women, school boys and school girls, substantial monuments have now been placed along the greater part ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... disappear. So strong was this impulse that, where the Highlands were concerned, men of sense gave ready credence to stories without evidence, and men of taste gave rapturous applause to compositions without merit. Epic poems, which any skilful and dispassionate critic would at a glance have perceived to be almost entirely modern, and which, if they had been published as modern, would have instantly found their proper place in company with Blackmore's Alfred and Wilkie's Epigoniad, were pronounced to be ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and sailed away to a hazard of new fortunes. The air was full of the tiny adventurers. As he stared up the street, Peter caught the glint of these invisible airships whisking away to whatever chance might hold for them. There was something epic in it. It recalled to the mulatto's mind some of Fabre's lovely descriptions. It reminded him of two or three books on entomology which he had left in his mother's cabin. He felt he ought to go after them while the spiders ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... Mulligan is coming too. Moore asked him to bring Haines. Did you hear Miss Mitchell's joke about Moore and Martyn? That Moore is Martyn's wild oats? Awfully clever, isn't it? They remind one of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says. Moore is the man for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in Dublin. With a saffron kilt? O'Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the grand old tongue. And his Dulcinea? James Stephens is ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Greeks) distinctly affirm that the day upon which Romulus founded the city was the 30th of the month. The Greeks likewise tell us that on that day an eclipse of the sun took place, which they think was that observed by Antimachus of Teos, the epic poet, which occurred in the third year of the sixth Olympiad. In the time of Varro the philosopher, who of all the Romans was most deeply versed in Roman history, there was one Taroutius, a companion of his, a philosopher and mathematician, who had especially devoted himself to the ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... heroic age of Europe—the Jerusalem Delivered is its epic poem. Then alone its warriors fought and died together. Banded together under a second "King of men," the forces of Christendom combated around the Holy City against the strength of Asia drawn to its defence. The cause was nobler, the end greater, the ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... poetry; to point out, and prophecy the man, who was born for no less an undertaking, and whom posterity shall bless for its accomplishment. Methinks, I am already taking fire from such a character, and making room for him, under a borrowed name, amongst the heroes of an epic poem. Neither could mine, or some more happy genius, want ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... obligation to Boccaccio in the Troilus and Criseyde, about a third of which is borrowed from the Filostrato. Nor is it a little remarkable that the same man, that in the Teseide and Filostrato founded the chivalrous epic, should also and in the same period of his literary activity, have written the first and not the least powerful and artistic of psychologic romances, for even such is ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Homer, had them carefully written down, and placed them in a public library, so that the Greeks could read them whenever they pleased. Until then these poems had only been recited, and no written copy existed. Pisistratus, therefore, did a very good work in thus keeping for our enjoyment the greatest epic ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... the true story of one of the greatest of English heroes, a story which shows him to have been at Hastings by the side of Harold, to have won fame there, to have continued the fight for English liberty as leader of the English patriots, and to have earned a place in the unsung English epic. ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... you can," said I, "a poet who can order his supper between the lines of his tragedy, or discuss the weather whilst he is composing epic verses." ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... great sanctuary of Boro-Boedoer which marks the traditional epoch between Buddhism and the later Hinduism, including Sakya Munyi among the avatars of Vishnu. The sacred trees and lions carved here on the walls of the temple quadrangle, give place in the galleries to scenes from the great Hindu epic of the Ramayan. The familiar form of Ganesh, the elephant-headed God of Wisdom, looms from the shadows of a vaulted shrine; Nandi, the sacred bull, stands beneath a carven canopy, and the great memorial of a bygone faith contains the identical galaxy of ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... he, in Odes and Epic Poems, are not introduced only to illustrate and embellish the Discourse, but to amuse and relax the Mind of the Reader, by frequently disengaging him from too painful an Attention to the Principal Subject, and by leading him into other agreeable Images. Homer, says he, excelled ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... us a great epic, or a great painting, or a great musical composition, but she has given us a great dance-poem, which is at the same time a painting and a song. Oh, you poor starved, blind soul, to be deprived of such beautiful spectacles. How I pity you, and how I pray you to give your children the privileges ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... taken by their chief Meng-ts'u under the Sung Dynasty; the Mongols made of their country the kingdom of Chaghan-djang. Li-kiang is the territory of Yue-si Chao, called also Mo-sie (Moso), one of the six Chao of Nan-Chao. The Moso of Li-kiang call themselves Ho. They have an epic styled Djiung-Ling (Moso Division) recounting the invasion of part of Tibet by the Moso. The Moso were submitted during the 8th century, by the King of Nan-Chao. They have a special hieroglyphic scrip, a specimen of which has been given by Deveria. (Frontiere, p. 166.) A manuscript ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... denunciations of injustice and tyranny, and his auguries of divine vengeance upon crime. Even on the unseemly legends of a popular mythology He casts His shadow, and is dimly discerned in the ode or the epic, as in troubled water or in fantastic dreams. All that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful, all that is beneficent, be it great or small, be it perfect or fragmentary, natural as well as supernatural, moral as well as ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... consider to have been an example of sustained invective such as one rarely encounters in this degenerate age. Well, her next essay in creative composition is my supper, which will be an equally spirited impromptu. To-morrow she will darn and sew me an epic; and her desserts will continue to be in the richest lyric vein. Such, sir, are the poems of Lisa, all addressed to me, who came so near to gallivanting ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... fire," a periphrasis for woman that bears gold on her arm. (2) "Skates that skim." etc.. a periphrasis for ships. (3) "Odin's mocking cup," mocking songs. (4) An allusion to the Beast Epic, where the cunning fox laughs at the flayed condition of his stupid foes, the wolf and bear. We should say, "Don't stop to speak with him, but rather beat ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... the epic struggle of my compatriots against Greeks and Turks, and I took part with them in order to obtain these national institutions. And did you come there in Ochrida, and everywhere in Macedonia protected by our valiant army of Lule Bourgas and Chataldja, to perform the duty ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... preceded by nine defective verses which probably preserve old epic turns of expression. The dialect is Bavarian, the theme that of Psalm XC, 2. The manuscript dates from the year 814. Wessobrunn was the ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... In the epic grandeur of such pictures as these there is something akin to sadness, though assuredly Millet did not mean them to be sad. Did he not say of the "Woman Carrying Water": "I have avoided, as I always ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... otherwise. Indeed one is tempted often to inquire of the latter, Why so much interest in what apparently seems to you of so little import? Are we never to have your skill, your observation, your amassing of "documents" turned to any account? Where is the realistic tragedy, comedy, epic, composition of any sort? Courbet's "Cantonniers," Manet's "Bar," or Bastien-Lepage's "Joan of Arc," perhaps. But what is indisputable is, that we are irretrievably committed to the present general aesthetic attitude and inspiration, and ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... something grandly terrible about it all. It was a barbaric invasion, an army, each man fighting for his own hand under the banner of gold. It was conquest. Every day, as I watched that human torrent, I realised how vast, how irresistible it was. It was Epic, it was Historical. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... spent in preparing the first edition, published in 1804-07. The work was based chiefly on Washington's own diaries and letters and secret archives and it told not simply the epic story of this great life but the truth about the birth of our nation. Marshall later spent fifteen years revising the first edition, verifying to the last detail every chapter, page and paragraph ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... L'Argent, which is the sequel to La Curee and deals with financial scandals. It was inspired by the failure of the Union Generale Bank a few years before, and is a powerful indictment of the law affecting joint-stock companies. To L'Argent there succeeded La Debacle, that prose epic of modern war, more complete and coherent than even the best of Tolstoi. And to end all came Le Docteur Pascal, winding up the series on ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... discovery of America by Columbus and the circumnavigation by Magellan can hardly be attributed to him, yet they were the consequences of a truly philosophical reasoning. But the investigation of Nature is an affair of genius, not of rules. No man can invent an organon for writing tragedies and epic poems. Bacon's system is, in its own terms, an idol of the theatre. It would scarcely guide a man to a solution of the riddle of AElia Laelia Crispis, or to that of the ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... lays down in one of his pronunciamientos on literature, "L'homme de genie n'a jamais d'esprit," is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull. And how well he succeeds! He is not without power. Indeed at times, as in Germinal, there is something almost epic in his work. But his work is entirely wrong from beginning to end, and wrong not on the ground of morals, but on the ground of art. From any ethical standpoint it is just what it should be. The author is perfectly truthful, ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... their lives to bring the little one ashore; and how the Brewsters had taken her into their home and brought her up. It was a simple tale and simply told, but the heroism of the romance touched it with an epic quality that gripped the listener's imagination and sympathies tenaciously. And now the waif snatched from the grasp of the covetous sea had blossomed into this exquisite being; this creature beloved, petted, and well-nigh spoiled ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... as any rover described in gay, romantic screeds, but, when my fitful life is over, no epic will narrate my deeds. Condemned to silent heroism, I go my unmarked way alone, and no one hands me prune or prism, as token that my deeds are known. But yesterday my teeth were aching, and to the painless dentist's lair I took my way, unawed, unquaking, and ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... Benfy, clearing his throat, "has, in his epic of the Oberon made admirable use of much the same idea, ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... in the dusk, and red hair. Perhaps this was why she was her father's favourite. She and Walter were especial chums; Di was the only one to whom he would ever read the verses he wrote himself—the only one who knew that he was secretly hard at work on an epic, strikingly resembling "Marmion" in some things, if not in others. She kept all his secrets, even from Nan, and told him ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... life. In allegorical interpretation persons are transformed into ideas and their history into a system of philosophy. The Greek philosophers had applied this method to Homer since the fourth century B.C.E., in order to read into the epic poet, whose work they regarded almost as a Divine revelation, their reflective theories of the universe. And doubtless the Jewish philosophers were influenced by ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... said little save to guide Beatrice and warn her of unusual difficulties, felt the somber magic of the place. No poet, he; only a man of hard and practical details. Yet he realized that, were he dowered with the faculty, here lay matter for an Epic of Death such as no Homer ever dreamed, no ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... The Age which produced the Faerie Queene II. The Author of the Faerie Queene III. Study of the Faerie Queene: 1. A Romantic Epic 2. Influence of the New Learning 3. Interpretation of the Allegory 4. The Spenserian Stanza 5. Versification 6. Diction and Style ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... of this amazing horse and predatory cow. Somewhere near the middle of the epic little Royal Beaudry usually dropped asleep. The rhythmic tale always comforted him. These nameless animals were very real friends of his. They had been companions of his tenderest years. He loved them with a devotion from which no fairy tale could ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... do, let me know," responded Hippy, "and I'll write an epic poem about you that will make the world sit up and ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... mob died down. The sight of Horatia (I beg her pardon humbly, Madame Tallafferr) in the path smote them with misgivings. As in Macaulay's immortal, if somewhat jingly epic, "those behind cried 'Forward' and those before cried 'Back'!" That single hale and fiery old lady held them. No more could those two hundred ruffians have defied the challenge of her contemptuous eyes than they could have advanced into the flaming ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... epic age, over whose departure my late eloquent and prophetic friend and correspondent, Edmund Burke, so movingly mourned. Yes, they were glorious times. But no sensible man, given to quiet domestic delights, would exchange his warm fireside and muffins, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... deeds, or other events of thrilling interest, are the theme of song, and the personal emotion of the bard is out of sight through his absorption in the subject. Description flows on, the narrator himself being in the background. This epic poetry culminates in the Iliad and Odyssey (900-700 B.C.). Their verse is the hexameter. These poems move on in a swift current, yet without abruptness or monotony. They are marked by a simplicity and a nobleness, a refinement ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Greek calm is hard to find. "For repose and serenity of mind," says a modern author, "we must go back to the Greek temple and statue, the Greek epic and drama, the Greek oration and moral treatise; and modern education will never become truly effectual till it brings more minds into happy contact with the ideal of a balanced, harmonious development of all the powers of mind, body, ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... generates mythology; in union with imagination and reason, it gives birth to theology and cosmogony; in union with imagination, reason, and experience, it is the source of philosophy; in union with the same, together with the artistic sense and high degrees of imaginative sympathy, it creates epic poetry and art. Its total outcome, however, may be included under the term Belief. And it results from an assumed validity of consciousness, that universal belief is always an indication of universal truth. At the same ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... wildly admired by readers of the intensely romantic school, but whose tragedies, melodramas, comedies, farces, operas, are now forgotten. In addition to these auxiliary labors, which ripened yearly, Pye tried his hand at an epic,—the subject, King Alfred,—the plot and treatment not greatly differing from those which Blackmore brought to the same enterprise. The poem passed at once from the bookshop to the trunk-maker,—not, however, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... the spring when Mr Stevenson's law studies were first interrupted by a journey south for his health, a clever student wrote an epic which was presented to me by one of Louis Stevenson's Balfour cousins as something very precious! The occasion was the Duke of Edinburgh's wedding, in 1874, and, yellow and faded, the Epic still graces my Every Day Book, and, as one reads its inspiriting lines, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... according to the modern canons of criticism, the Reviewer is expected to show his immense superiority to the author reviewed, and at the same time to relieve the tediousness of narration, by turning the epic, dramatic, moral story before him into quaint and lively burlesque." (Quarterly, May, 1809.) In his review of the Life and Works of John Home he speaks of "the hackneyed rules of criticism, which, having crushed a hundred poets, will never, it may be prophesied, ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... contribution to the history of India, published by Mr Wheeler,(15) gives a complete insight into this interesting topic; and this passage of the ancient Sanskrit epic forms one of the most wonderful and thrilling scenes ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... race of giants. Their like has hardly been seen in any other epoch of that sublime scrimmage called history. Five or six names may be selected from the list of the early American prophets whose deeds and outcry, if reduced to hexameters, would be not the Iliad, not the Jerusalem Delivered, but the Epic ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... received two parcels; the Chanson de Roland gives me infinite pleasure—particularly the Introduction, treating of the national epic and of the Mahabharata which, it seems, tells of the fight between the spirits of ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... sets to work on the world-famous Sacred and Profane Love, and shows us the Cadorine painter interpreting, at the suggestion of some learned humanist at his elbow, an incident in the Seventh Book of the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus—that wearisome imitation of the similarly named epic of Apollonius Rhodius. Medea—the sumptuously attired dame who does duty as Sacred Love(!)—sits at the fountain in unrestful self-communing, leaning one arm on a mysterious casket, and holding ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... of Queen Guenever. In like manner the love-story of Tristan and Isolde was joined by other romancers to the Arthur-Saga. This came probably from Brittany or Cornwall. Thus there grew up a great epic cycle of Arthurian romance, with a fixed shape and a unity and vitality which have prolonged it to our own day and rendered it capable of a deeper and more spiritual treatment and a more artistic {24} handling by such ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Verse.—When rhyme is omitted, we have blank verse. This is the most dignified of all kinds of verse, and is, therefore, appropriate for epic and dramatic poetry, where it is chiefly found. Most blank verse makes use of the iambic pentameter measure, but we find many exceptions. Read the following examples of blank verse so as to show ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... persons themselves, speaking and acting upon the stage: in the epic, on the contrary, the poet only relates the different adventures of his characters. It is natural to be delighted with fine descriptions of events, in which illustrious persons and whole nations are interested; and hence the epic poem had its origin. But we are quite differently ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... as to the site of the town which was so long besieged by the Greeks; and certain sceptical spirits even went so far as to deny that there ever was such a person as Homer at all, or that if there were, he wrote the epic poem which has borne his . name so long. Tradition, however, was pretty constant in pointing to the hill of Hissarlik as the site on which Troy was built. Strabo was quite an exception in relegating the town to the lower end of the ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... classes—literary, philosophical, historical. On the "literary" studies he expatiates at great length: to begin with, the historian must "have read with attention the great models." Which great models? Daunou "does not hesitate" to place in the front rank "the masterpieces of epic poetry;" for "it is the poets who have created the art of narrative, and whoever has not learnt it from them cannot have more than an imperfect knowledge of it." He further recommends the reading of modern novels; "they will teach the method ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... beautiful paint of natural truths. In Chardin's case—by him the relativity of mundane things was accepted with philosophic phlegm—an onion was more important than an angel, a copper stew-pan as thrilling as an epic. And then the humanity of his youth holding a fiddle and bow, the exquisite textures of skin and hair, and the glance of the eyes. You believe the story told of his advice to his confrere: "Paint with sentiment." But he mixed his sentiment with lovely colours, he is one of the chief ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... thyself free of Manhood's guild, Pull down thy barns and greater build, Pluck from the sunset's fruit of gold, Glean from the heavens and ocean old, From fireside lone and trampling street Let thy life garner daily wheat, The epic of a man rehearse, Be something better than thy verse, And thou shalt hear the life-blood flow From farthest ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... tendency sometimes given is that the Negro is only a generation from slavery. It should not be forgotten that individuals of every other race in history have at some time been held slaves. The bondage of Israel is to-day only an epic poem. The Greek Slave adorns simply a niche in some palace of art. The Servii of Rome instructed the masters of the world. The Anglo-Saxon has not only worn the Roman and Norman collars, but individuals ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... literary revival took place which brought back the old glories of the age of Sargon. Once more new editions were made of standard works, poets arose to celebrate the deeds of the monarch, and books became multiplied. Among the literary products of the period was the great Chaldaean Epic in twelve books, recording the adventures of the hero Gilgames, and embodying the Chaldaean story ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... familiar only with the Northern standpoint. But he has not the least appreciation of the anti-slavery spirit in its heroic phase. On the wrongs of the slave he is silent, while upon the sins of the carpet-bagger he is eloquent. This one-sidedness robs of its significance what should be the American epic ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... and poetically told legends of Ireland's epic hero Fionn. A book for the boy or girl who loves the old romances, and a book for story-telling or reading aloud. "Stories of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers of ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... giving a pretty complete outline of the founder of the Teutonic race we have in our notes given all the Heimskringla sketch of the Black Sea Odin. We have done this, not only on account of the material it furnishes as the groundwork of a Teutonic epic, which we trust the muses will ere long direct some one to write, but also on account of the vivid picture it gives of Teutonic life as shaped and controlled by ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... the public estimation. Weber himself, however, was by no means a man to disregard the tenor of the words and characters he was to associate with his music, and was greatly charmed with his English coadjutor's operatic version of Wieland's fairy epic. He was invited to come over to London and himself superintend the ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... written on the fly-leaf of the MS., "I would not wish to hurt the honest pride of any Italian; but the works of a great genius are the property of all ages and all countries: and I hope it will be recorded to future ages, that England possesses the original MS. of one of the four greatest epic poems the world has produced, and, beyond all doubt, the only one of the four now existing." There is no date to this MS. The first printed edition of the Gerusalemme is ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... of the wild buffalo is morose and uncertain, and such is its strength and courage that in the Hindu epic of the Ramayana its onslaught is compared to that of the tiger.[1] It is never quite safe to approach them, if disturbed in their pasture or alarmed from their repose in the shallow lakes. On such occasions they hurry into line, draw up in defensive array, ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent |
